Due to a trend of health consciousness, there are recently more and more foods and drinks low in sugar or salt, and foods and drinks rich in ingredients which are considered to be beneficial to health. For example, general processes for producing foods and drinks low in sugar or salt include use of high-intensity sweeteners instead of sugar and use of potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride. Many of these alternative ingredients have distinctively unpleasant taste, and substitution or reduction of sugar or salt often makes people unsatisfied with the flavor as compared with that of the original food or drink. Those having sour taste, typified by vinegar, are said to be beneficial to health but many people often do not like eating and drinking them, thus there is a need to improve their flavor.
Patent Literature 1 discloses that hydroxy flavanones reduce the bitter taste of high-intensity sweeteners, minerals, and the like. Patent Literature 2 discloses that γ-aminobutyric acid or salts thereof reduce the unpleasant flavor of high-intensity sweeteners, minerals, and the like.
Although these two literatures disclose improvement of taste by hydroxy flavanones (including naringenin) and γ-aminobutyric acid, the above methods require addition of relatively large amounts of the ingredients but do not always produce sufficient effects.
Patent Literature 3 discloses that combination of high-intensity sweeteners with vegetable juices and alcohol reduces the sweet aftertaste and unpleasant aftertaste of the high-intensity sweeteners. Patent Literature 4 discloses that de-flavored discolored tomato serum is utilized as a salt substitute. Patent Literature 5 discloses that a clear tomato concentrate is used as a taste enhancer.
These three patent literatures disclose that vegetable juices or others considered to contain naringenin and γ-aminobutyric acid are used to improve the flavor of high-intensity sweeteners, foods, or drinks. In the above methods, however, large quantities of vegetable juices and others are required to obtain desired flavor-improving effects, or the properties of the flavor-modifying effects are limited to specific ones such as addition of saltiness. These methods thus cannot be applied to various target products or various types of flavors.